Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) When a non-confrontational playwright loses her engagement ring, she must travel through Italy to get it back with a man who was supposed to be just a one-night stand, discussing love and lying along the way.
About: Brooke Baker is fairly new to the screenwriting scene. Although she did write one episode of the TV mini-series, “Pam and Tommy.” This script finished on last year’s Black List with 15 votes.
Writer: Brooke Baker
Details: 104 pages
Kaitlyn Dever for Eleanor?
We’ve got a feminist interpretation of the rom-com genre in the latest Black List entry. Seeing the world though any socially progressive lens is going to give you a huge leg up on your Black List competition. Even if the script isn’t very good.
Eleanor is an English playwright who lives in New York and is vacationing in Rome. Eleanor is engaged to Noah, who she’s known since college. The whole reason she’s in Rome is to research an acting role in an upcoming play.
While there, she stumbles upon a funny handsome tour guide who delivers comedic zingers like, “This is the Fiumi Fountain, or Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi. It was sculpted for Pope Innocent the tenth representing the four continents of papal influence. The cost of it could have fed people on those continents, but what’s hunger when you have the opportunity for an homage.” We may not be smitten by this lumbering joke. But for Eleanor, it’s the best joke she’s ever heard.
The two run into each other later, get a few drinks, and the next thing you know they’re performing a highly inappropriate naked variation of the Macarena. The next morning they concede it was a nice one-night stand and off Eleanor goes to meet a friend in Milan.
But while there, she loses her purse, which contains the engagement ring she wasn’t wearing. After a series of confusing actions that bring us back to Rome, Eleanor reunites with Lucas, who agrees to escort her back to Milan to locate her engagement ring.
That ring becomes an empty McGuffin as it’s only there to allow Lucas and Eleanor to spend more time together and commit more sins against humanity. It turns out, by the way, that Lucas is cheating on someone as well, the girlfriend he hasn’t told Eleanor about.
The two then proceed to look down on others to build up themselves, endearing them to us even more. Eventually, Eleanor figures out that Lucas has a girlfriend, storms off, and is lectured by her lesbian best friend who, for some reason, considers this the optimal moment to scold Eleanor for being straight. If she was gay, she says, her life would be perfect. It inspires Eleanor to dump Noah. But will she still reconnect with Lucas?
Let me start off by saying this is one of the most ideal types of scripts you can write – something with a light easy-to-understand premise, it’s marketable, it has a lot dialogue, and it’s easy to keep up with.
That doesn’t mean it’s the best *movie* to write. But script readers love scripts like this because they require so little investment. The reader can just sit back and enjoy themselves without thinking too much.
To that end, I commend “There You Are.” I read this script at a coffee shop. I tend to be a spaz at coffee shops, looking around at everyone every five seconds. This makes it nearly impossible for me to read scripts there.
But I had zero issues reading this script. So that says something.
However, when a script is really simple and only has a few characters, it is imperative that we like those characters. And I didn’t like Eleanor.
One thing that all writers should watch out for is writing characters who think they’re better than the rest of the world. Eleanor starts the movie out highly judgmental of some guy who hits on her. Then, seconds later, proceeds to fall in love with a man she hasn’t even met despite being engaged. Objectively speaking, which individual is more in the wrong here? The fact that the writer doesn’t realize that it’s Eleanor is odd.
And because this happens right when we meet Eleanor, we formulate a big fat negative opinion about our protagonist. Which means now you’re in the hole with the reader. It doesn’t mean you can’t change their mind. But you’ve added a ton more work for yourself if you plan to get yourself out of that hole.
A great comp for a movie that did this correctly was Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The character of Vicky, just like Eleanor, is engaged and she’s in another country and some attractive man hits on her. But Vicky is aggressively resistant towards him. This gets us on her side. We like that she’s done the right thing.
It’s only through a series of unpredictable events that Vicky is forced to spend time with Juan, where she finds out he’s actually much deeper and more thoughtful than she originally assumed. We watch them start to fall for each other in an organic way. So that when they finally sleep together, it feels natural and not like Vicky was instigating it.
Meanwhile, Eleanor’s over here raising her hand in the middle of the Collesum screaming, “Yaz, queen! Hit me up with that Italian D!” Which we would champion if she wasn’t engaged. But since she is, we’re, like, “What are you doing??” And we don’t like Lucas either. Because he’s cheating on his girlfriend as well.
As the movie goes on and the two begin exhibiting some guilt about what they did, they inch back towards respectability. But, by that time, the hole they dug was too deep. We despised what these two were doing, Eleanor in particular.
Also, there seemed to be these spotlight moments where both the writer and character say things that are completely un-self-aware. Late in the film when Eleanor’s friend points out that, despite everything, Eleanor seems to have enjoyed the experience, Eleanor replies, “God that’s depressing. The best time of my life was hanging out on a train with some a$$hole cheating on his girlfriend.” Wait a minute. Does Eleanor have access to a mirror??
You can make the argument that this movie is exploring reality as opposed to the bubble gum version of relationships and dating. Sometimes, as human beings, we do dumb illogical s—t. Sleep with the wrong people. Hurt those we love. The problem is, the script doesn’t have the requisite touch required to hold up to this more complex view of humanity.
Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s exploration of young love while traveling contains much deeper and more thoughtful conversations, the likes of which support the complex mistakes we make. Everything in There You Are made me think of a Netflix rom-com. And you can’t have brazenly unlikable leads in a Netflix rom-com. That’s not what we’re looking for when we press “play.”
Another story that did all of this way better was the second season of White Lotus. Portia falls for this guy, Jack, and their experience takes on this weird unpredictable journey where it turns out Jack’s life is a lot more complicated than it first seemed. And Portia starts to realize that she’s in over her head.
Meanwhile, “There You Are,” is a wish-fulfillment female fantasy that avoids the consequences of being selfish. The girl still gets the guy, despite both of them making deeply flawed choices they never have to answer for.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your characters ever act like they’re better than others, we won’t like them. There’s this scene where Eleanor and Lucas are out at a bar and they meet some cool Americans and immediately start lying to them about who they are and acting like these other people, who just want to hang out, aren’t worthy of their time or respect. It solidified my dislike not just for them as individuals, but for them as a couple. From that point on, there was no way these two were ever going to climb back out of that unlikable hole.
What I learned 2: Don’t describe your characters with adjectives in your logline that are unconnected to the rest of the logline. Today’s logline starts with: “When a non-confrontational playwright loses her engagement ring…” How does being non-confrontational connect to anything else in this logline? If you had described her as a “commitment-phobe,” now you have a connecting adjective since the movie is about her cheating. But “non-confrontational?” That’s random and, therefore, makes the logline feel amateurish.
Genre: Biopic/Historical
Premise: The story of the development of the atomic bomb by its creator, J Robert Oppenheimer.
About: While it may not be getting Barbie-level love, Oppenheimer still somehow pulled in 80 million dollars this weekend, putting it on pace to become the biggest non-musical biopic ever. Believe it or not, writer Christopher Nolan wrote the Oppenheimer script in the first person! He also finished the script in a matter of months (not surprising after seeing the finished product).
Writers: Christopher Nolan (based on the book by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin)
Details: 3 hours long
The computer seat layout for my AMC showing of Oppenheimer showed a 98% full capacity. But when I got into the theater, it was only 40% full. Looks like this fake seat-buying scam is becoming an epidemic!
But the important thing is that I finally got into the theater and saw Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Yahoo!
How was it?
Let’s find out.
I’m going to present the plot summary the way I saw it. I’m not going to look up anything online to help me because I want the movie to do the work on its own. If I got something wrong, it was the movie’s fault for not making it clear enough.
Oppenheimer starts in the late 30s when a clumsy young Robert Oppenheimer begins teaching a new form of physics – quantum physics. When World War 2 starts, a guy named Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) approaches Oppenheimer to start the Manhattan Project, which is the building of the first atomic bomb.
We then start jumping between three other storylines. One is set in the future (aka, present) where a man named Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) is testifying in front of Congress about – I think – whether the building of the bomb was the right thing to do and, also, whether Oppenheimer had been too sympathetic with the Russians during that time.
A third timeline has Oppenheimer, himself, being interrogated by a separate group of people about a couple of his Russian friends.
A fourth timeline seems to be embedded between these sections – although it’s unclear where – where we see Oppenheimer fall for a co-worker who’s a bit of a crazy pants (Florence Pugh). Oppenheimer eventually leaves her for a woman named Kitty (Emily Blunt).
I was never entirely clear on when everything took place. I was most comfortable in the Manhattan Project section because it was the only section where I was clear on what was happening. And it definitely was the best section.
It wasn’t as much of a race against time as I was hoping for. But the narrative was, at least, pushing forward. And when they finally do build the bomb and send it off to the military who then blow up Hiroshima, we never see any of that. We, instead, stay with Oppenheimer, who has very complex feelings about this bomb he built.
We then spend the last 45 minutes of the film in some political bugaboo plot where Oppenheimer and Strauss battle it out over issues that nobody who didn’t read the Oppenheimer biography understood. The end.
I’ve never questioned Christopher Nolan’s ability as a filmmaker. He may be the best pure filmmaker on the planet, his only competition, David Fincher.
Nolan clearly went into this thing wanting to catch a feeling. The feeling of what it was like at that time working on the most important project humanity had ever worked on.
And the way he went about it was… okay, I guess.
As per usual, Nolan is determined to prove he’s no ordinary storyteller. He laughs in the face of structure, eschewing 3 acts for this topsy-turvy maze of cross-cutting between the past, the semi-past, and the present. Taking a chapter out of Sorkin’s handbook, we get this “courtroom” present plotline that helps us look back at the building of the bomb, similar to what Sorkin did with The Social Network.
Nolan’s approach doesn’t have a rhyme or reason to it other than to keep us on our toes in hopes that we don’t get bored by watching 10,000 characters have 5000 conversations in medium-sized government rooms.
Indeed, I spent much of the running time trying to keep up with all the dots I was tasked with connecting. That kept my mind active enough that I wasn’t bored. Yet I was constantly asking myself what this was all about.
The only driving force behind the narrative was the construction of the bomb itself. Much like how we knew the ship was going to sink in Titanic, we know the bomb will be completed and blown up in Oppenheimer. Except in Titanic, we were with the people who were going to die, making the proceedings a lot more personal. Here, we never meet any of the people who are going to die by the bomb’s hand, eating into the drama considerably.
One of the most disappointing choices Nolan makes is not showing us the bomb exploding in Japan. And I know exactly why he didn’t show us. Because he rationalized: “Oppenheimer didn’t get to see it. So why should we?” It is one of the weaknesses that makes Nolan such a spotty writer. Everyone in the audience wanted to see that bomb go off. That’s what we’ve been waiting this whole movie for. And you’re not going to show us? It is the curse of the faux auteur. When you believe in yourself so highly as an artist, you deliberately make your audience suffer. It’s bad form.
Instead, Nolan seems way more interested in the less compelling storyline of “Is Oppenheimer sympathetic to communism or not?” The audience’s collective response to that question is, “Who the hell cares?” Nobody!
Oppenheimer ended the war. That’s what we care about. If he had a few Russian friends along the way, what does that matter? HE STILL ENDED THE WAR. He still won the war for the United States and the Allies. Why are we quibbling over his drinking buddies?
Nolan doubles-down, forcing the audience to stay in their seats a full 45 minutes after the movie has ended (the bomb has been dropped and Japan has surrendered) so that we can wonder if one of the Russians on the Manhattan Project spied and took all of Oppenheimer’s nuclear secrets, resulting in the Russians learning how to build nuclear bombs and starting an arms race.
Why do we not care about this? Because WE KNOW NOTHING COMES OF IT! We’re all still here. No nuclear wars have happened. So who cares? This is the most pointless plotline to focus on. Not to mention, Russia would’ve figured out how to build nuclear weapons regardless of whether there was a spy or not. The movie makes it clear early on that several countries were making rapid progress on building atomic bombs.
Because Nolan doesn’t know how to write, he missed the much better story option of leaning into the thriller aspects of this story. You had the most natural ticking time bomb ever (a LITERAL ticking time bomb). We have to build this bomb or hundreds of thousands more people will die in this drawn out war with the Japanese. Add the threat of someone else building a bomb before we did and you have yourself a much more effective narrative. Think The Imitation Game, which executed its war story much better.
But the biggest stumble by the brick and mortar director was his final act, if you can call it that. It went on and on and on and on. Rocky’s already won the goddamned fight! Find Adrian, kiss her, then GET THE F OUT! You’re done. The movie’s over.
Nope. Not Nolan. The man’s confused writer mind thought the better route would be to climax then keep you around for 45 minutes of pillow talk. Pillow talk is an apt metaphor, as half the things you say post-coital are mumbling incoherence. There was some beef between Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr.’s character that was the worst combination of super complex and completely irrelevant. WE DON’T CARE! WE CARED ABOUT THE FREAKING BOMB! Not whether two crybabies can say sorry to one another. Sheesh.
I’m sorry. I just can’t hold it in with this guy. He’s so talented in some respects but has this giant blind spot when it comes to his screenwriting. Oppenheimer reminds me a lot of Fincher’s “Mank.” Self-important. Pretentious. More about the director’s experience than the audience’s.
I’m not saying it doesn’t have anything to celebrate. Seeing all these great actors in one place was cool. Rami Malik, who lead his own billion dollar movie, is an extra in this film. That should give you an idea of the level of acting that was on display here.
Florence Pugh’s character was interesting. It provided the most human touch to the film.
And everything was beautiful to look at, of course.
But where’s the structure, man? Someone needs to sit Christopher Nolan down and explain to him that when you give the audience a climax, you’ve got about ten minutes max before they want to go home. Forcing them to stay at the party long after it was over was what turned this into a ‘not for me.’
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You can’t have your cake and eat it too in screenwriting. According to Nolan, he was fascinated by delayed consequences for one’s actions. So he really wanted to know what effect this bomb had on Oppenheimer long after it’d been used. But he also wanted to show the building and use of the bomb. Those are two different stories. You can tell a story about one. You can tell a story about the other. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too. At least not in a movie. Maybe in a TV show. No one other than the most obsessed Nolan Stans are anything other than bored out of their minds during the final 45 minutes of this film because Nolan was trying to do two things that don’t complement each other.
I tried to go see Barbenheimer this weekend but I didn’t see the Barb or the Heimer. And it wasn’t my fault! I have been going to the movies for the past 3 years and the rule that has always worked for me is that if I go before noon, all the theaters are empty.
That wasn’t the case on Friday. When I arrived at the Grove – at 9:30 am mind you! – I saw a wave of pink. It was as if I was on some boat in the middle of a cotton candy ocean during a glitter-stoked hurricane.
There were a total of 4 seats in the first three Barbie showings and they were all that seat in the front of the theater all the way on the right.
So I said, “Okay, no problem. I’ll just see Oppenheimer.” But then, to my utter confusion, all the Oppenheimer showings were sold out as well! What the heck is going on here, I said out loud to myself, to which a nearby glob of hot pink-clad men responded, “Okay Barbie, he’s not invited to the party.”
Through my deductive skills, I arrived at the theory that families had come to the multiplex and split in two distinct directions the second they neared the concession stand. The women headed to Barbie and the men went off to see Oppenheimer. Which left me out of the movie loop for the weekend because I’d already had plans for Saturday and Sunday.
So what I think I’m going to do is go and see Oppenheimer tomorrow and write a review for Tuesday. It shouldn’t be hard to get a ticket for a historical biopic on a Monday morning, should it? The Barbenheimer train can’t possibly have that much steam.
Strangely enough, I’m okay with this delay. It just builds up the anticipation even more. We don’t get to feel anticipation for films like we used to. These days it’s superheroes all the way down and their promotional campaigns are all so orchestrated and predictable that we know exactly what we’re getting by the time we walk into the theater.
Oppenheimer’s and Barbie’s campaigns harken back to the days when Hollywood still left some mystery on the table as to what you were going to see. The reason for that is that all of Hollywood’s market research up to this point has told them that audiences are more likely to show up if they know exactly what’s going to happen in a movie.
Director Robert Zemeckis used to get a lot of flak for this because he began the trend of showing you the entire movie in the trailer. And when people complained about it, he said, “Sorry, this is what the research tells us. That you guys want to know what’s going to happen ahead of time.” And so every other marketing campaign started doing the same thing.
But the reality is, every movie is different and should approach its marketing campaign differently because some movies benefit from a sense of mystery. I’ll never EVER forget the marketing campaign for Cloverfield. That trailer showed up out of nowhere with nobody knowing it was coming and then there was no other information about the movie until it came out. Surprise surprise, it became this huge unexpected hit. There need to be more creative people on the marketing side who think like this in 2023. And Oppenheimer and Barbie prove that a few still do.
Cause I think a HUGE reason these movies both did so well was that each had a curiosity factor to them.
Plus, whoever made the decision to tell Nolan to take the giant pole out of his a$$ needs their own Academy award. The “got Nolan to take a pole out of his a$$” Oscar. This genius idea to pair Nolan with a Robert Downey Jr. who just drank 14 cups of coffee did something I thought impossible – make Nolan look like a fun guy.
Nolan is so far up his own butt when he talks about movies that he’s become a parody of an auteur and it doesn’t help when he makes sweeping mistakes in his films, mainly on the screenwriting side. The guy is still working towards building the most exposition-heavy library of films of all time. And I’m assuming this film is only going to add to that Guiness book of world records.
So when you think you’re the bee’s knees yet you’re inundating us with second-rate pollen, we’re not going to be as tolerant of your “I am the arbiter of cinema” persona.
But watching Nolan desperately try not to laugh at everything Robert Downey said but being unable was so endearing that it made me see him in a whole new light.
I think Nolan studies not just how to make great movies but also how to be perceived as an all-time great artist. He’s, no doubt, studied the way people like Alfred Hitchcock talked to the media and the way Stanley Kubrick created an aura around him. Everybody knows how Kubrick used to say to his lead actors that when the press tour came around, he would tell them how amazing the actor was if the actor went out called him the greatest director he had ever worked with.
Relating this all back to this weekend, what does the 155 million dollar take of Barbie and the 80 million dollar take of Oppenheimer mean?
If every box office tells a story, this one is telling studios that the days of superheroes ruling the box office are over. I’m not saying no superhero movie will ever do well again. But Marvel so oversaturated the market that it’s impossible for anything other than one or two superhero movies to break out during the year. Cause we’re tired of them.
So much so that we’d rather show up for a plastic doll and a 3 hour talky period piece about one of the most depressing subjects of the last century.
Marvel did this to themselves. They drank so much of their own kool-aid that they thought we’d like shows like the 200 million dollar Secret Invasion, a Marvel misfire that’s been so badly received, it will alter the way Marvel shows are greenlit moving forward.
But seriously. The way these two movies are being received by audiences is screaming to studios, “We want something different!” Are those studios going to listen? History has told us, no, they aren’t. Hollywood is terrified of moving away from proven models. They get very nervous in times like these where they’ve been unable to predict how a movie would do.
Just a few weeks ago, Barbie was being projected for a 60 million dollar weekend and Oppenheimer for a 45 million dollar weekend. It was only because of early ticket sales that those numbers went up. Not because Hollywood figured that out on their own. Which means they were nowhere close to understanding how well these movies would perform.
Which isn’t supposed to happen, by the way. Hollywood has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into being able to gauge what a movie’s return will be. If they’re off by even 20 million bucks on that opening weekend, it shines a light on the fact that they’re not good at their jobs. But being off by 100 million dollars? That means they’re utterly clueless.
I’d make the case that this is the most important box office story of the last five years. Movies like this aren’t supposed to perform better than Marvel movies. They aren’t even supposed to perform better than Mission Impossible movies. And throw Sound of Freedom in there as well. When a small conservative-leaning film is beating out a 400 million dollar film on certain weekends, Hollywood has lost the thread in regards to what audiences really want.
I’m supportive of this change. Even if it means more big-budget biopics during the year. Because you’re not going to get people out into the theater without some variety. Barbenheimer proved that this weekend.
Every second-to-last Friday of the month, I post the five best loglines submitted to me. You, the readers of the site, will vote for your favorite in the comments section. I then review the script of the logline that received the most votes the following Friday.
This month we’re doing something different. We’re reviewing TV PILOT loglines. As much as I love movies, the bread and butter of the writing industry is TV. So we gotta give TV folk some love! This is your time to shine, TV folk. Don’t disappoint us!
If you want to participate in a future showdown, we’ll be back to highlighting feature film loglines next month. The deadline for that is Thursday, August 24th, 10pm Pacific Time. All I need is your title, genre, and logline. Send all submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com.
If you’re one of the many writers who feel helpless when it comes to loglines, I offer logline consultations. They’re cheap – just $25. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested.
Okay, time to get to the loglines. Voting closes on Sunday, 11:59pm, Pacific Time.
Title: BEYOND HELP with Handy Andy
Genre: 30-minute mockumentary sitcom
Logline: A parody of ‘makeover’ reality shows, Beyond Help with Handy Andy follows overconfident yet completely incompetent “Handy Andy” Cornwall as he travels the country documenting his attempts to fix everything from failing restaurants to broken marriages, in the hopes of selling his half-assed reality show to a network. Look out, America. He’s helping!
Title: Quiet Zone
Genre: Thriller/Drama
Logline: In a small town located within the ‘Quiet Zone’ – an area of the country where cell service, WiFi and other transmissions are banned due to a secretive government research facility – an ambitious journalist investigates a string of missing persons cases and finds herself unraveling a larger conspiracy as she begins to expose the dark secrets within the zone.
Title: CREATURES OF HABIT
Genre: Supernatural Comedy
Logline: An impulsive vampire searching for her soulmate and her eclectic group of friends struggle with love, morality, immortality, and keeping their supernatural identities secret in New Orleans’ French Quarter. It’s Friends meets The Vampire Diaries.
Title: Mr. Pink
Genre: Half-Hour Adult Animated Comedy
Logline: Set in Key West amidst eccentric locals, drunken tourists, and a cult-like butterfly conservatory, an insecure flamingo fights to maintain his macho persona in order to win over the heart of his potential mate.
Title: The President’s New Clothes
Genre: Comedy, Absurd Comedy
Logline: A blue-collar construction worker from Texas struggles to maintain his integrity in the murky swamp of Washington D.C after he’s suddenly elected to Congress.
Title: Critical
Genre: Comedy/Horror 30-minute
Logline: A famously sour film critic learns that the characters and creations belonging to the works he’s given his most scathing reviews to have come to life to kill him.
Title: MR. HOLLYWOOD
Genre: Drama
Logline: Mercurial movie star Nate Moore, self-loathing and borderline narcissistic, is at an emotional crossroads. On the verge of a breakdown because of vapid Hollywood excess he returns to his small hometown, where he left a trail of destruction six years ago, determined to win back the heart of his childhood sweetheart and reconnect with his estranged family.
TV Pilot loglines are due tonight (Thursday) by 10pm Pacific Time!
“Pick me!”
Get those TV Pilot Loglines in! Here are the details!
What: TV Pilot Logline Showdown
When: The Showdown is on July 21st
Deadline: Thursday, July 20th, 10pm Pacific Time
What: send your title, genre, and logline
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
When we do these, “Why didn’t my logline get picked” posts, we usually do them after the fact. But I decided to change things up because we have a lot of TV loglines and I know all of you are eager to see if your entry made the top 5. So, at least this way, a few of you will know where you stand ahead of time. Let’s jump into it!
Title: THE LOCAL
Genre: Drama (one-hour)
Logline: A labor union president facing a tough re-election hires the estranged daughter of a hospital CEO to go behind enemy lines and help the union organize her father’s workforce.
Analysis: One of the tougher things about judging TV pilot loglines is that they’re rarely as concept-heavy as movie loglines. So I’m inherently aware that I’m not going to get “Source Code” in any of these pitches. With that said, your logline still has to leave an impression on the reader. There has to be some level of excitement on our end. And all that happens when I read this logline is I think, “That’s it?” There’s very little specificity to help this idea stand out from all the other TV shows out there. I mean, contrast this with the TV Pilot I just reviewed the other week with a group of rich people who hide out in a countryside mansion while they wait out the Black Plague. Note how specific that is. You feel like you’ve never seen anything like that before and that’s because you haven’t. Re-elections and unions and workforces… it goes right through one ear and out the other. The one specific element in the logline is the hospital CEO. But it isn’t woven into the presentation in a way that feels interesting.
Title: The Villainesses
Genre: Action/Comedy/Indie
Logline: In a small town where Villains are banished to live out the rest of their days, three female Villains must ban together to stop the other Villains from destroying the town. But the sociopathic Dictator that put them there, disagrees…
Analysis: It’s always a red flag to me when a logline contains unnecessary capitalization. Cause what I immediately think is, “If this person doesn’t even know that certain words shouldn’t be capitalized, how can I trust them to write a full story?” I know it seems trivial to some why industry people reject ideas. But, at the very least, your presentation should be spotless because too many people have come before you with bad presentation and taught those readers that their subsequent scripts are always bad. So the readers are just going off of past experience. Maybe your sloppy presentation is the one time where the script is still awesome. But most people aren’t going to give you that chance. And these are easy things to take care of with a quick logline consult ($25 – carsonreeves1@gmail.com). As for the idea itself, I don’t dislike the idea of villains being relegated to a, sort of, purgatory. And a showdown between villains in the town seems fun. But I don’t know why they have to be female villains who take on everyone else. Seems kind of random. And the final sentence about the dictator feels tacked on and inelegant, destroying any momentum that the logline may have had.
Title: Pwned
Genre: Action / Adventure
Logline: After being transported to a strange world where their earth-bound video game skills are manifestly real, four gamers use their respective skills of driving, shooting, athletics, and impersonation to join an uprising against a fascist politician in order to win their freedom and return home.
Analysis: So, with an idea like this, you run into a huge problem, which is that a great version of this concept has already been made, in Jumanji. I’m sure the writer would contend that his movie is nothing like Jumanji. But you have to look at things through the reader’s eyes. The reader is ALWAYS looking to compare movie ideas. It’s automatic. So you can’t really escape comparison if your idea is even slightly similar to another idea. And when you’re going up against a really great execution of that idea, your idea will almost uniformly feel like the “not as good” version. And that’s kind of what I felt here. Jumanji was just so fun because the characters got stuck in bodies that allowed them to play the complete opposite of who they were in real life. It was quite clever. Whereas this just seems more straightforward. Gamers who each have a particular skill team up inside a game to try and get home. It’s not a bad idea. But you don’t get points for writing “not bad” ideas. Your idea has to be something special. Despite this critique, I liked the title.
Title: The Wilderness
Genre: Dark comedy
Logline: A lonely, workaholic lawyer risks spending his entire life in prison after he chooses to harbor a mysterious fugitive with whom he’s fallen in love.
Analysis: I wanted to get one in here that had a specific “TV” reason for why it wasn’t picked. Can anybody guess why this didn’t make the cut? I’ll give you a second because I think it’s obvious. Ready? It doesn’t have enough meat on the bone to extend out into a full series. You’ve only got two characters, for starters. Most TV shows have a ton of characters because they need enough people to cut back and forth between to fill up a full season of television. On top of that, the central conflict is too simple. Someone is allowing a fugitive to stay with them. You have to put yourself in the eyes of the logline reader and ask, ‘what kind of show does the reader imagine from this logline?’ I’m imagining a guy talking to a fugitive in his house for 48 minutes a week. And the conflict isn’t even strong enough to support one episode of that. There was a show on Apple TV not long ago where Domhall Gleeson was holding his therapist (Steve Carrell) hostage. At least that setup had some genuine conflict. This feels too small time. I hope there’s more to this. If there is, it needs to be in the logline.
Title: Horror Adjacent
Genre: Horror/Comedy
Logline: Fed up with living next door to a haunted house, the Peevey family are desperate to move, but soon discover how hard it is to sell when your neighbor is a poltergeist.
Analysis: So, with this setup, we’ve at least got something marketable to work with. There are the beginnings of a fun idea here. My problem is a similar problem I have with half the loglines sent to me, which is that the end of the logline peters out. It doesn’t make sense. Why would the poltergeist in the house *next* door prevent you from selling *your* house? Maybe there’s a reason in the script. But we don’t have the script. We just have this logline. I see this mistake ALL THE TIME. The writer assumes we know just as much as he does. Honey, I got news for you. We only know what you show us. And I’m not making the logical connection of why a neighbor’s poltergeist won’t let you sell your own home. I could maybe understand why a poltergeist wouldn’t let you out of the house you both shared. But even then, I’m not sure why the poltergeist would want you to stay. That probably needs to be in the logline.
Props and thank you to the five writers in the line of fire today. You guys are brave for allowing your loglines to be put on blast. And just so you know, LOGLINES ARE HARD. Don’t feel bad. 99% of writers can’t come up with a good concept AND write a good logline. It’s hard.
The only reason I know how to do it is because I spent a decade having no choice but to write up loglines for the scripts I was reviewing. So if you want to practice, do that. Watch a movie and, afterward, write out the logline. Do that for every movie you see and script you read and you will get better. If the only time you ever write loglines is whenever you finish a script? You’re only going to be practicing loglines once a year.
Seeya tomorrow where our top 5 TV loglines will be revealed. And if you need help crafting your logline, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com. A basic logline consult is just 25 bucks.
